The world, we are told, was made
especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men
are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's
universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.
They have precise dogmatic insight into the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly
possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen
idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentlemen in favor either of a
republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and
language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools
and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet at a half-
penny theater.
With such views of the Creator it is, of
course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such
properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem - food and clothing
"for us," eating grass and daisies white by divine appointment for this
predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the
eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan, whales are
storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the
discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants, hemp, to say nothing of the
cereals, is a case of evident destination for ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and
hanging the wicked. Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers
and ploughs, and lead for bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of
insignificant things.
But if we should ask these profound
expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals - lions, tigers,
alligators - which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious
insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and
drink for all these? Oh no! Not at all! These are unresolvable difficulties connected with
Eden's apple and the Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison
him? Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of creation
subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic, or
in some way connected with the first garden.
Now, it never seems to occur to these
far- seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be
first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness
of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of
creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not
essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete
without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic
creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
From the dust of the earth, from the
common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has
made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born
companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious
patch-work of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies
reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not
content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones
who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.
This star, our own good earth, made many
a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures
enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings
have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general
burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.
Plants are credited with but dim and
uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a
mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind
exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?
But I have wandered from my subject. I
stated a page or two back that man claimed the earth was made for him and I was going to
say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth
prove that the whole world was not made for him. When an animal from a tropical climate is
taken to high latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never
intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the
tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates.
No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the cause of the difficulty, though she may
never have seen a fever district; or will consider it a providential chastisement for some
self-invented form of sin.
Furthermore, all uneatable and
uncivilized animals, and all plants which carry prickles, are deplorable evils which,
according to closes researches of clergy, require the cleansing chemistry of universal
planetary combustion. But more than aught else mankind requires burning, as being in great
part wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt
and purify us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the
tophetization of the erratic genius Homo were a consummation devoutly to be prayed for.
But, glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I joyfully return to the
immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature. |
